Experience creating a digital magazine

Hello, gentlemen! I would like to tell the story of my project, namely, a free digital magazine about games and about game themes.

Start

You can't say a lot about how the idea itself came about, except maybe - suddenly an idea appeared in my bright head, that's it. Later, I told about this idea to my friends and went, it went ... Actually, I want to tell you more about it.

I blinded him from what was ...

Finding good authors who are ready to work for an idea is almost impossible, so the initial “edition” was formed from friends who want to write articles. Yes, my friends are not the best solution, but I just could not find another way out.

')

Over time, authors began to come to us from different parts of the Internet. People wrote to us that they want to participate in the creation ... but more on that later.

How will it look like?

As such, there was no question about the format of the magazine, we immediately knew that it would be a pdf magazine. Actually, we couldn’t think about anything else; it seemed to us absolutely impossible to print a magazine, and even now it doesn’t seem very real.



We also knew immediately where to publish the magazine. One of my good friends remembered the Hacker magazine, which was posting his old issues on issuu.com. A little polaziv on it, we realized that it suits us well.



Design. About him you can say a lot, but it is unlikely that someone will be interested. Let me just say that in the process of evolution, we changed Photoshop to InDesign, and the standard template of gaming magazines was changed to a completely new, if I'm not mistaken, design. Simply put, look at several issues of the magazine, in order of exit. Changes to the face.

How do people know about us?

To give the correct answer to this question, I can not to this day. We didn’t want our child to disappear into obscurity, so it was necessary to do something quickly. The first time we decided to post our magazine in the VKontakte group. Yes, stupid, but there were no more ideas. What did we get? 10 comments and about 120 views. (At the moment, the first release of more than 1400 views. How, we do not know)



Later, we still thought of something more or less reasonable - to post the magazine on the forums. Being not so active an Internet user, I knew only two forums, on which we actually publish the magazine.

How to manage it?

For the articles to be written in time, you needed some kind of project management system. We came across a “Worksection”, free, convenient to use. There is, of course, one minus, the limit of disk space - 10 Mb. But in the future, there were no problems with this since we started using Google Docs.



What can you say about the structure of the journal? Within 2-3 days after the release of the journal, a task is created with a list of games released / leaving this month. The authors go there and choose the game, which will write a review. Further, the author creates a task, where he writes the name of the game and indicates the terms for writing the article. (1 week) After writing the article, the author leaves a link to it in the comments to the problem. After the task is closed, the article is checked by the editor and, in fact, I give this article a “journalistic look”.

You will be a tank!

At first, the authors in the journal were mixed in one pile, they wrote all about the games and nothing more. But once, one of our readers, cursing a lot, suggested that we divide the authors into three groups: Previews, Reviews, Special Materials. As we actually did.



There is not much to say about “Reviews” and “Special Materials”, but you should pay attention to “Preview”. I have to say right away that we are not so cool that we were allowed to play games before release. Then the question arises - how do you write a preview? Very simple. Our authors watch trailers, gameplay videos, etc. Then write a small article-preview on the game. That's all.

Community

As I said, over time, we began to come from different parts of the Internet. They wanted to write articles, to participate in the creation of the magazine. Since the people were not many of us, it would be foolish to refuse anyone to join the team. At least that's what I thought and still think.



The opinion of our readers is very important to us. Each new issue we looked through all the comments, answered questions, led discussions. We tried to listen to readers.

Is there a future?

I would like to say that yes, only now ... I have repeatedly asked this question on various forums / sites. As it turned out, people prefer themed sites more. Indeed, it is much easier to go to any site and see all the necessary information than to wait a month for a magazine.

Many now say that magazines still have a future, but not on the PC anymore. On iPads and others like him. But then this opera is no longer for us.



Unfortunately, we didn’t find a designer, and I personally decided to leave the magazine, so the September issue , which was published recently, will be our last.



PS I hope you liked the article and learned something new from it :)